You meet two types of people in the world. I'm not talking your Type A or Type B personalities. I'm talking those who believe in free will and those who disregard it. Free will has been a popular topic for thousands of years; it's one of the most befuddling subjects philosophers have ever dared to question. It's really not that complicated of a question, though.

Do we have free will, or is everything that has been and everything that will be predestined?

There is no right or wrong answer here. We have free will, but at the same time, everything is predetermined. A well-known concept in philosophy is determinism. If you're not aware, determinism is defined as,

"the philosophical position that for every event there exist conditions that cause no other event."

For example, I'm about to cross a busy street while I'm looking down at my phone. I cross and don't see a car speeding towards me, and I get hit. That changes everything that my life should have been. Now imagine that I'm about to cross a busy street while I'm looking down at my phone, but a dime glinting in the sun catches my eye and I stop to pick it up. The car continues speeding past and I don't get hit because that dime caused me to cross five seconds later. Each action I had only had one outcome, which you can think of as predestined. But at the same time, I have free will. I could have left the dime there, because it's only 10 cents. I either choose to leave it or to pick it up. I can have free will and my every action can have a predetermined outcome because of the existence of parallel universes.

I'm not preaching that I can accidentally end up in a parallel universe or anything, but they are definitely real. It's a self-contained reality within our own reality. Every time you question, "what if..." you're picturing what would have happened if you'd done something differently. That's a parallel universe. It's not something physical or something you can ever see, but it's real. You make a decision, and that decision has an outcome. If you step on the end of a rake, you know the handle is going to come up and hit you. That's the outcome that was fated to happen. You've heard the phrase, "every action has a reaction." You knew the rake was going to hit you before you stepped on it. You chose a path of action, and that path had consequences. The Butterfly Effect is a theory that basically implies that the tiniest of events (like the flap of a butterfly's wings) can cause a chain reaction (that energy from the flap of the wing can cause a tornado). That's how life is. You make a decision, no matter how small or pointless it seems, and it leads to an outcome that puts you in a different situation than you would have been in had you done something slightly differently. There are infinite parallel universes, one for each possible thing you could have done differently for every second of your entire life. The possibilities of what could have happened are endless.

Christians believe in free will, and they also believe God intervenes to save them. I can't speak for other religions. Some atheists believe that they have free will, too, and some believe that every aspect of their lives is planned out. I have two questions: why would we be here if we couldn't control anything at all? Do those who believe that their life is planned ahead think that there is some greater force that just created us for entertainment? I don't understand how people can not believe in free will. We definitely have free will. We also have some parts--but not all--of our lives planned out. I'm currently a junior in college. I can choose to drop out even though I'm halfway done, but I don't get to choose whether or not my parents kick me out. My dropping out of college only has one possible conclusion that I don't have a say in. What if I had dropped out of college after my first semester? My parents would have a different reaction and I'd be facing different consequences. All the "what ifs," and imagining I didn't drop out of college create parallel universes. There would have been different consequences depending on when I dropped out, and those are all parallel universes. It's like a different world where I stayed in college and graduated. It isn't the real world, but it could have been. Parallel universes are what could have been.

My point is that we have free will. We can choice to take the road on the left, or the road on the right (free will). However, we don't choose the outcomes; one specific reaction will follow every decision we make (determinism).We choose our actions. Our consequences were predestined. It's just a matter of making the right choices to get the outcome you want. So if anyone in their life blames their problems on destiny, it's true, but they chose their destiny. There isn't a greater force that planned my actions. What would even be the point of consciousness if we don't have any control over ourselves? Without our consciousness, we wouldn't be able to make decisions and wouldn't have free will.